Tofu 3.1

I’ve just released Tofu 3.1, an update to my text reader for the Mac. Its interface controls now use the new Liquid Glass appearance on macOS 26 Tahoe, and the app icon has also been adapted for Tahoe, including dark and clear variants. I’ve also done some code maintenance which prepares Tofu for compatibility with future macOS releases.

Like previous versions, Tofu remains free. If you enjoy it, please consider making a donation to support its development.

To get notified of future releases of Tofu and my other apps, sign up to my mailing list.

Introducing Exercised

Like many people, I like to have an idea of whether I’m phsically active enough to maintain my health. I used to rely on my phone’s automatic step counting, with the well-known (and in my case aspirational) goal of 10,000 steps per day in mind.

However, when I went swimming – one of the more conscious efforts I’ve made to stay fit – my phone would never find out, sitting oblivious in a locker while I breathlessly flailed up and down the pool.

A smartwatch can be with you more of the time, but I’d have to remember to start recording a session before I begin, choose the type of activity, etc. Perhaps a watch might detect a swim automatically, but what about when I do archery? My device would think I’m mainly standing around for a couple of hours, when in fact I’m using about 3 times more energy than that. And all of this assumes that I’d even be willing to buy and wear a smartwatch in the first place, which, as it happens, I’m not.

In short, more comprehensive fitness tracking seems to make greater demands on your memory and your patience than I’m sure many of us are able to muster.

Designing Tachyo

There is no shortage of software metronomes in this world. I imagine that many people pick it as an exercise when learning to design or program, believing it to be a nice and simple task.

Yet despite this abundance of options, I didn’t find one that I was satisfied with. They all somehow missed the mark, not so much in terms of functionality, but in terms of usability and quality.

So I set out to create Tachyo, a new metronome for iOS. But getting there turned out to be an even deeper design and implementation challenge than I had anticipated.

Introducing Tachyo

Tachyo is a new metronome for iOS. It’s my first new app in 15 years, and also my first project after going fully independent earlier this year.

Now, you may ask if there aren’t already enough other metronome apps out there. There certainly are many. But, as is so often the case when I look for software, I haven’t found any of them to be quite satisfactory.

Beyond the obvious functional requirements (and my personal ones are actually quite basic), there are a number of usability and quality requirements that I think tend to get ignored.

Goodbye, Google. Hello, World!

When I joined Google in 2011, it felt like I was realising a dream. I had been working primarily as a software engineer, with my design activities limited to an unofficial portion of my job and to personal projects in my spare time. Google provided an opportunity to be a full-time interaction designer working with very clever people on widely used products, in a fairytale-like work environment.

But time changes things, including your perspective. In the last 12 years, Google got a lot bigger, making it a very different place to operate in. Also, not everything may turn out like in your dream – for instance, my field (UX) hasn’t developed into the rigorous, science-based discipline I had hoped it would. And, perhaps most significantly, I got to know myself better, learning what I enjoy and what frustrates or stresses me. So a new dream began to form.

Licensed 1.5.1

I’ve just published a minor update to Licensed, my free app for storing software licenses. It fixes a bug where the contents of the Notes field were not legible when using macOS’s dark mode. Download the latest version here. You can read more about the previous update to version 1.5 in this blog post.

Also, I now gratefully accept donations, in case you enjoy my free apps and would like to support me in developing more in the future (more news on that soon).

Tofu 3.0

Tofu started as an experiment 20 years ago. It was based on a hypothesis that long lines of text and vertical scrolling made it challenging to read on your computer. Arranging text in columns seemed like an elegant way to address both the movement and the line length.

I was amazed at how well the solution was received. Of all the apps I’ve made, Tofu has been the most popular. It’s also the one people missed the most after I announced in 2014 that I wasn’t planning to update it again, especially when the last version became incompatible with macOS releases beyond 10.14.

As requests for an update kept continuing even into 2023, I finally decided to update Tofu to run on modern Macs. I also took the opportunity to make many improvements to usability and layout, increase performance and fix bugs. The result is Tofu 3.0.

Licensed 1.5 (and Tofu news)

In 2014, I announced that I was not planning further development of my Mac and iOS apps. I have a couple of updates on that.

Licensed 1.5 now available

One thing I still intended to do was update Licensed, my Mac app for managing software licenses. That update is finally here. I’m sorry it took so long.

My main motivation was to add an export function, so that you could get your data into other tools such as a spreadsheet, and finally say goodbye to Licensed if you were still relying on it.

But it also turns out that technology moves on in 14 years (yes, that’s how long it’s been!), and the app couldn’t even run at all on recent versions of macOS. So that became the first problem to address. Licensed is now built to run on macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) through 13 (Ventura). This update also increases the chances that Licensed will work with future macOS versions.

The quest for the perfect movie rating

For the last 15 years or so, I’ve been using IMDb to look up how good movies are supposed to be. I also try to do my bit by submitting ratings for those I’ve watched. So far, I’ve rated nearly 700 films. In recent years, I’ve noticed more and more people referring to Rotten Tomatoes as their trusted source. Also, IMDb has started listing Metacritic’s score alongside their own, and Google can show all three in their search results for a film. Naturally, I had to go and look at the data to figure out which site I should be using.

Now tweeting

I have a very high threshold for joining social networks, but I recently overcame this in a rare instance and finally started posting on Twitter. If you don't use an RSS reader, this may be the best way to find out when I publish new articles. I also share briefer thoughts there which I wouldn't put on this blog (this post is already exceptionally short).

Here I am: @amar_designer

Demystifying colour management

Colour management is a pretty arcane subject to most people, even if it’s relevant to their work. I recently spent some time trying to understand it, and encountered two challenges. First, I didn’t find any really clear explanation of the concepts involved. Some are thorough but difficult to follow. Others give practical advice without elucidating the fundamentals. The second problem is that there’s conflicting advice about best practices when designing for the web.

I’d like to take on the challenge of addressing both of these issues. I will first explain some of the basic concepts behind colour management, using illustrations that hopefully make it easier to understand. I will then talk about practical implications for web-oriented design.

How it works

Colours can be described in different ways, for example as a mix of red, green and blue light, or in terms of their hue, saturation and lightness. In each of these colour models, you can think of the dimensions as forming a "space". One such colour space is called CIE xyY, and I’ll use it for my illustrations here. It contains all the colours visible to the average human eye, and has the convenient property that, although it’s three-dimensional, you can look at it "from above" and get a nice, two-dimensional map of chromaticities at maximum brightness:

When you’re working on a particular display, it’ll only be able to show a subset of all visible colours. This range is called its gamut and will have a triangular footprint in the CIE xyY space (as will any other RGB space):

If a colour profile describes a sub-space like this which exactly corresponds to the range of colours your display can actually show, it’s said to be perfectly calibrated.

5 years later…

UPDATE – 1 July 2023: Tofu is still alive, with version 3.0 now available, and Licensed got an update too.

Wow, that was longer between posts than I had intended.

Seriously, though, I'm sorry for the long silence, and for the lack of updates to my software. I'm going to tell you a bit about what's happening with my apps, my life and this blog.

So what’s been going on?

After many years of working mainly as a software engineer with a passion for design, I managed to fulfil my dream of becoming a full-time interaction designer in 2011 by joining Google. I moved from London to Switzerland to join their office in Zurich, where I live today.

Previously, my creative energy needed an outlet outside my job, which my free Mac and iOS apps provided. Since becoming a full-time designer, I feel that much less of my capacity has been available to put into extra-curricular projects.

Let me tell you my plan for each of my apps. There is a general theme of retirement, but I think these are the right decisions to make, and, as I explain at the end, I intend to direct my energy into efforts that I hope will be of more benefit.

Cambio

I never used to be particularly interested in designing mobile applications. I just thought it was a hopeless platform, plagued by tiny screens and keys that were designed for inputting numbers (how often do you actually type numbers into your phone?) I also had never thought of my phone as something that I want to use for various applications. This scepticism had become so ingrained that I initially didn't even see much point in Apple opening up the iPhone for third-party developers. I thought it might destroy the purity of this well-designed platform if developers were suddenly given reign over users' mobile screens.

However, two months ago or so, a certain curiosity, a thirst for a new challenge and a feeling that I was missing a boat (to where I did not know) combined to make me go out and buy an iPod touch (I don't want to buy an iPhone because my current phone deal is too good to give up). I almost immediately appreciated both what a well-designed platform it is and what a compelling playground the third-party application market represents, for users and developers alike.

Tofu 2.0.1

Tofu 2.0 was released yesterday, which allows reading simple PDF documents, has a less obtrusive full-screen mode, supports scrolling on MacBook trackpads and is a Universal Binary (that is, it includes a native build for Intel Macs). An alpha version with most of these features had been available for quite some time, but it had some bugs, and it only recently dawned on me how to solve the trackpad problem.

I have since released revision 2.0.1, which fixes some bugs in yesterday's release.

In case you don't know what Tofu is: it tries to make reading text on the screen more pleasant by wrapping it into columns, which you navigate from left to right without ever scrolling vertically.

Go and get it here.

The science of keyboard design

The Handbook of Human–Computer Interaction, edited by Martin Helander, Thomas Landauer and Prasad Prabhu, is a book published in 1997 that attempts to summarise research relevant to the design of interactive software and hardware. Its 62 chapters fill 1500 pages and provide advice on a multitude of topics, covering analysis, design and evaluation of interactive systems, as well as the psychological and ergonomic underpinnings of human–computer interaction. One of those chapters is titled Keys and Keyboards and was written by James Lewis, Kathleen Potosnak and Regis Magyar. It considers virtually every imaginable factor involved in designing keyboards, and, by drawing from experimental studies, provides recommendations for each of them. Ever since I read this chapter a couple of years ago, I've been meaning to summarise some of their conclusions and to consider them in the context of modern keyboard design. The recent string of keyboard-related links on Daring Fireball (e.g. here, here, here, here, here and here) moved me to finally sit down and do it, so here it is.

Hyphens, dashes, et cetera

I have a thing about correct punctuation, and although I'm aware that most people would find me over-zealous in this regard, I would bring to my defence that it's not just a pointless obsession or a purely aesthetic matter. A bit of poor punctuation will in the best case distract those from the text who notice it and affect their impression of the author, and in the worst case actually give the reader trouble understanding a sentence. Having said that, what I'm going to write about today is more on the aesthetic side, but could nevertheless help you make a good impression on a reader who notices these things.

Surface computing, move over!

For a few weeks now, my two team-mates at work and I have been using a “horizontal” whiteboard, lying across the desk surface between us. I had been wanting to try this for a while, but it wasn’t possible because of our previous desk arrangement. Now that we have this large area of space between us and no partitions, this small whiteboard fits perfectly without getting in the way.

We’ve found ourselves using it virtually every day, illustrating explanations, walking through calculations and brainstorming design ideas. Visitors will intuitively pick up a pen and start using the whiteboard when explaining things. It somehow seems to invite people to use it more than most whiteboards. However, it’s not only a collaborative tool: it also makes a great scratch-pad when you’re brainstorming on your own. To ensure that it stays useful, we make an effort to keep the board clean; nothing tends to stay on there for longer than a day or so.

Overall, it’s being used far more than any wall-mounted whiteboards we’ve had near us, and I think this is due to two key differences to wall-mounted boards. Firstly, each one of us can reach the board very easily without having to get up. You just turn your chair slightly and there it is. Secondly, the whiteboard is between us, so it feels less like a presentation aid and more like a collaborative work surface, accessible equally well from all sides.

If your work involves collaborative problem-solving, and if your desk arrangement allows it, I highly recommend setting up a whiteboard like this. Don’t make it too big, because you won’t be able to reach all corners and it will also eat into your desk real-estate. I think ours is 90×60 cm, which is just right. I also recommend investing in some pens with a finer tip than the standard ones you tend to get. Those are designed to be visible from a few meters away, but you’ll find them too thick for handwriting at a comfortable size for close-up work. Edding do quite a range of dry-erase board markers.

Neutech desktop background redux

There was once an appearance theme for Mac OS 8 and 9 called Neutech, by Flanksteak Design. I don't think I particular liked the theme as a whole, but it included a desktop background that has been my favourite background for the last eight years or so since I discovered it:

Here's a detail:

I have made sure I that I always have a copy, which has survived across all the different Macs I've used since. However, the image is only 1024 × 768 pixels, which wasn't small at the time, but makes the image look rather pixelated and blurry on modern displays. I have made several attempts in the past to reproduce it in Photoshop, but never got very far. Today, I sat down again with renewed determination and finally found the secret recipe to emulate the look of the original:

One thing that really helped here was Photoshop CS3's Smart Filters, because I could experiment and keep tweaking the many effects I had to apply. This also means that I can easily produce updated versions in the future as screen resolutions increase.

For the time being, here's a 2560 × 1600 version.

Update: I've changed the grid to look more like dried earth and less like reptile skin, and made minor changes to shading.

Namely 2.5

Sorry to be late by a week or so, but there are several reasons why I didn't get a Leopard-compatible update to Namely out sooner.

First of all, I didn't have Leopard any earlier than most of you; I bought it on Friday the 26th of October at the Apple Store on Regent Street. That's because unlike many Mac developers who dedicate a lot more time to this stuff and who have an income from it, I don't have a Select membership with the Apple Developer Connection.

Secondly, I decided to try out Leopard's improved support for application launching through Spotlight before putting any effort into updating Namely. Ever since Scott Forstall had hinted at this feature at the World-Wide Developers' Conference in 2006, I had been feeling a bit anxious about Leopard rendering Namely redundant. (I generally think it's a good thing when Apple fills a gap that was identified and addressed by third-party developers, but nevertheless, we do tend to fall in love with our applications.) My verdict: Spotlight is not bad, but it didn't win me over. I didn't spend enough time with it to figure out how clever it is about choosing between candidate matches (it seems to at least take into account which app you chose last time), but long enough to find a few things that I didn't like about it:

1. A lot of stuff happens visually in the Spotlight menu, which distracts from your main task: quickly identifying the application you want to launch.
   
2. The icons of listed apps don't always appear straightaway.


3. It only shows three matches, so it's effectively a bit less tolerant.

I guess these things shouldn't be an issue if you only occasionally need an application that's not in your Dock. Finding it through Spotlight will still be much faster than navigating to it in the Finder. But I think that if you use Namely (or, for that matter, any other keyboard-based launcher) for most of your application launching, anything that isn't super-fast isn't fast enough. When I launch an application, I don't want to think much, and I don't want to see much. I just want to launch it. Although Namely's sorting isn't perfectly predictable because it adapts over time, it stabilises quickly enough so you can be pretty confident about what it will suggest when you type something.

The third reason for the delay is that I just wasn't sure what to release. I have been (slowly) working on Namely 3.0, which is controlled through a preference pane and doesn't show up in the Dock. So I was considering finishing that off rather than releasing another update to Namely 2.x. However, I wasn't confident that I could get Namely 3 finished and stable within a few days, so I decided to push out a minor update in the meantime.

Here it is. Annoyingly, I couldn't find a way to make it work on both 10.3.9/10.4 and 10.5 (I link against the 10.5 libraries in order to support Spaces, but this seems to stop Apple's secret application-listing function from working on 10.4), so I had to leave version 2.1 available as a separate download.

Coupland and Helvetica

Douglas Coupland last night at the Bloomsbury theatre in London (at what he said was probably his last ever book reading):

...and someone said making a film about Helvetica is like making a film about off-white paint.

I think in Helvetica. I love Helvetica.

For more of his thoughts on the typeface, also see this piece in the New York Times.